This volume, which originated in a forum at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, collects articles under the theme of “religious ecology.” The editor, Aaron M. Wright, pitches the book to an interdisciplinary audience interested in “the relationship between faith and place” (p. xi) and describes it as a contribution to the field of religion and ecology (FRE), an approach within the environmental humanities that embraces a decentering of human perspectives and advocates for socioecological justice.
Sacred Southwestern Landscapes covers the time frame of approximately AD 200 to the present. Geographically, its chapters are roughly split between the northern and southern American Southwest (including northern Mexico). The volume contains considerable theoretical and methodological diversity. Most chapters are phenomenological in approach, attempting to capture lived experiences of a place. A number apply animistic perspectives to objects or landforms. The book is well produced: color illustrations are abundant, and maps are large and well formatted.
In chapter 2, Myles R. Miller considers deposits of unusual artifacts as evidence of place-making and pilgrimage in the Jornada and Mimbres regions of southern New Mexico. Referencing both Navajo and Pueblo ethnographic analogies, he suggests that these objects were animate, embodying the places from which they were taken. In chapter 3, Michael T. Searcy, Todd Pitezel, Steve Swanson, and Scott M. Ure investigate the cosmography of the built landscape at Casas Grandes (Paquimé) in the Chihuahuan Desert of northern Mexico, including potential astronomical alignments of its mounds. Wright and Henry D. Wallace (chapter 4) explore semiotics in Hohokam culture in southern Arizona, interpreting mountains, rock images, and shell artifacts as symbolic of bonds between people and their environment. In chapter 5, Julio Amador Bech links astronomical alignments, rock images, and shell artifacts at Trincheras sites in the Sonoran Desert to ceremonies related to rain and fertility. Wright, Lorey Cachora, and Nathalie Ø. Brusgaard (chapter 6) interpret rock images and a fascinating pattern of trails in the lower Gila River area through the lens of ethnographically documented Yuman dreaming.
Switching to the northern Southwest, in chapter 7, Polly Schaafsma and William B. Tsosie present a nuanced reconstruction of Navajo cosmology across time and space, reflecting on the relationship between Navajo and Pueblo belief systems and disjunctures in rock-imagery production in the post-Revolt era. Sean Feld (chapter 8) examines “timber pilgrimage” in Chaco Canyon, a practice that involved both centralized authority and individual meaning-making. In chapter 9, Barry Price Steinbrecher, Maren P. Hopkins, Octavius Seowtewa, and Paul Tosa consider how places can be instilled with the meaning of another place or concept (metonymy) in pueblo landscapes through case studies at Aztec Ruins and the Jemez Mountains in northern New Mexico. In an important contribution, Samuel J. Duwe and Kurt F. Anschuetz (chapter 10) remind us that there is considerable diversity in contemporary and historic Indigenous ceremonial practice and meaning that underlies seemingly universal cosmological principles, urging caution in the use of ethnographic analogy when reconstructing ancient religious practices. In chapter 11, Mark T. Lycett and Phillip O. Leckman compare place-making among Pueblo and Spanish communities in the Rio Grande Valley through concepts of center, movement, and scale. Sylvia Rodriguez (chapter 12) explores Hispanic Catholic religious processions, tracing the practice from top-down to bottom-up expressions. In chapter 13, Darryl Wilkinson and Severin Fowles consider “Western esotericism” as expressed through distorted modern reinterpretations of traditional Native American imagery and practices.
Two final chapters provide commentary on the volume. Anschuetz (chapter 14) argues that to comprehend sacred landscapes, we must understand how the people who inhabited them “earned their living” spiritually. He also advocates for greater rigor in defining landscape terminology. A very brief afterword by John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker (two leading figures in the FRE movement) encourages archaeologists to apply their research to contemporary social justice applications.
Given the diversity of the volume, readers will likely find some approaches that resonate more strongly than others. I appreciated the many creative ways that authors used “pieces of places” to reconstruct people’s sacred engagements with their natural landscapes. Some chapters would benefit from a more critical examination of time and of the stability of landscape formations, and Duwe and Anschuetz’s cautions about ethnographic analogy hang over several chapters. In sum, the volume breaks interesting new ground in religious ecology that should inspire substantial further work.
